THE CASE OF THE
SUICIDAL FARMER by Vandana Shiva, (Botanist,
Biologist, Agrarian expert

)

ALL OVER INDIA, FARMERS
HAVE BEEN KILLING THEMSELVES,They were FORCED TO USE American GM
SEEDS, American made PESTICIDES are always needed on these
plants! Crops were good but GM seed was too costly for
them, WORSE, poisons required by the plants made BEES die
off. COLONY COLLAPSE. NATURAL CYCLES DESTROYED! NO FOOD at
all for these poor subsistence farmers. Bankrupt,
foreclosed,they lost the farm & TOOK POISON TO COMMIT
SUICIDE

Vandana Shiva
writes: “Recently, I was visiting Bhatinda in Punjab
because of an epidemic of
farmer suicides. Punjab used to be the most
prosperous agricultural region in India. Today every
farmer is in debt and despair. Vast stretches of land have
become waterlogged desert. And as an old farmer pointed
out, even the trees have stopped bearing fruit because
heavy use of pesticides has killed the pollinators
- the bees and butterflies.

And Punjab is not alone in
experiencing this ecological and social disaster. Last
year I was in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh where farmers have
also been committing suicide. Farmers who traditionally
grew pulses and millets and paddy have been lured by seed
companies to buy hybrid cottonseeds referred to by the
seed merchants as "white gold", which were supposed to
make them millionaires. Instead they became paupers.

Their native seeds have
been DISPLACED with new hybrids which cannot be saved and
need to be purchased every year at high cost. Hybrids are
also very vulnerable to pest attacks. Spending on
pesticides in Warangal has shot up 2000 per cent from $2.5
million in the 1980s to $50 million in1997. Now farmers
are consuming the same pesticides as a way of killing
themselves so that they can escape permanently from
unpayable debt!

The corporations are now
trying to introduce genetically engineered seed, which
will further increase costs and ecological risks. That is
why farmers like Malla Reddy of the Andhra Pradesh
Farmers' Union had uprooted Monsanto's genetically
engineered Bollgard cotton in Warangal.On March 27th, 25
year old Betavati Ratan took his life because he couldn’t
pay pack debts for drilling a deep tube well on his
two-acre farm. The wells are now dry, as are the wells in
Gujarat and Rajasthan where more than 50 million people
face a water famine.

The drought is not a
"natural disaster". It is "man-made". It is the result of
mining of scarce ground water in arid regions to grow
thirsty cash crops for exports instead of water prudent
food crops for local needs.

It is experiences such as
these, which tell me that we are so wrong to be smug about
the new global economy. I will argue in this lecture that
it is time to stop and think about the impact of
globalization on the lives of ordinary people. This is
vital to achieve sustainability.

Seattle and the World Trade
Organization protests last year have forced everyone to
think again. Throughout this lecture series people have
referred to different aspects of sustainable development
taking globalization for granted. For me it is now time
radically tore-evaluate what we are doing. For what we are
doing in the name of globalization to the poor is brutal
and unforgivable. This is especially evident in India as
we witness the unfolding disasters of globalization
,especially in food and agriculture. Who feeds the world?
My answer is very different to that given by most people.

It is women and small
farmers working with biodiversity who are the primary food
providers in the Third World, and contrary to the dominant
assumption, their biodiversity based small farms are more
productive than industrial monocultures.

The rich diversity and
sustainable systems of food production are being destroyed
in the name of increasing food production. However, with
the destruction of diversity, rich sources of nutrition
disappear. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre,
and from the perspective biodiversity, the so-called "high
yields" of industrial agriculture or industrial fisheries
do not imply more production of food and nutrition.

Yields usually refers to
production per unit area of a single crop. Output refers
to the total production of diverse crops and products.
Planting only one crop in the entire field as a
monoculture will of course increase its individual yield.
Planting multiple crops in a mixture will have low yields
of individual crops, but will have high total output of
food. Yields have been defined in such a way as to make
the food production on small farms by small farmers
disappear. This hides the production by millions of women
farmers in the Third World -farmers like those in my
native Himalayas who fought against logging in the Chipko
movement, who in their terraced fields even today grow
Jhangora (barnyard millet), Marsha (Amaranth), Tur (Pigeon
Pea), Urad (Black gram), Gahat (horse gram), Soya Bean
(Glycine Max), Bhat (GlycineSoya) - endless diversity in
their fields. From the biodiversity perspective,
biodiversity based productivity is higher than monoculture
productivity. I call this blindness to the high
productivity of diversity a "Monoculture of the Mind",
which creates monocultures in our fields and in our world.

The Mayan peasants in the
Chiapas are characterized as unproductive because they
produce only 2 tons of corn per acre. However, the overall
food output is 20 tons per acre when the diversity of
their beans and squashes, their vegetables their fruit
trees are taken into account.

In Java, small farmers
cultivate 607 species in their home gardens. In
sub-Saharan Africa, women cultivate 120 different plants.
A single home garden in Thailand has 230 species, and
African home gardens have more than 60 species of trees.

Rural families in the Congo
eat leaves from more than 50 species of their farm trees.
A study in eastern Nigeria found that home gardens
occupying only 2 percent of a household's farmland
accounted for half of the farm's total output. In
Indonesia 20 percent of household income and 40 per cent
of domestic food supplies come from the home gardens
managed by women.

Research done by FAO has
shown that small biodiverse farms can produce thousands of
times more food than large, industrial monocultures.

And diversity in addition
to giving more food is the best strategy for preventing
drought and desertification. What the world needs to feed
a growing population sustainably is biodiversity
intensification, not the chemical intensification or the intensification
of genetic engineering. While women and small peasants
feed the world through biodiversity we are repeatedly told
that without genetic engineering and globalization of
agriculture the world will starve. In spite of all
empirical evidence showing that genetic engineering does
not produce more food and in fact often leads to a yield
decline, it is constantly promoted as the only alternative
available for feeding the hungry.

That is why I ask, who
feeds the world?

This deliberate blindness
to diversity, the blindness to nature’s production,
production by women, production by Third World farmers
allows destruction and appropriation to be projected as
creation.

Take the case of the
much-flouted "golden rice" or genetically engineered,
Vitamin A rice as a cure for blindness. It is assumed that
without genetic engineering we cannot remove Vitamin A
deficiency. However, nature gives us abundant and diverse
sources of vitamin A. If rice was not polished, rice
itself would provide Vitamin A. If herbicides were not
sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have bathua,
amaranth, mustard leaves as delicious and nutritious
greens that provide Vitamin A.

But the myth of creation
presents biotechnologists as the creators of Vitamin A,
negating nature's diverse gifts and women's knowledge of
how to use this diversity to feed their children and
families.

The most efficient means of
rendering the destruction of nature, local economies and
small autonomous producers is by rendering their
production invisible.

Women who produce for their
families and communities are treated as`non-productive'
and `economically' inactive. The devaluation of women’s
work, and of work done in sustainable economies, is the
natural outcome of a system constructed by capitalist
patriarchy. This is how globalisation destroys local
economies and destruction itself is counted as growth.

The globalization of
non-sustainable industrial agriculture is literally
evaporating the incomes of Third World farmers through a
combination of devaluation of currencies, increase in
costs of production anda collapse in commodity prices.

Farmers everywhere are
being paid a fraction of what they received for the same
commodity a decade ago. The Canadian National Farmers
Union put it like this in a report to the senate this
year:” While the farmers growing cereal grains - wheat,
oats, corn - earn negative returns and are pushed close to
bankruptcy, the companies that make breakfast cereals reap
huge profits. In 1998, cereal companies Kellogg’s, Quaker
Oats, and General Mills enjoyed return on equity rates of
56%, 165% and 222% respectively. While a bushel of corn
sold for less than $4, a bushel of corn flakes sold for
$133 ... Maybe farmers are making too little because
others are taking too much."

And a World Bank report has
admitted, "behind the polarization of domestic consumer
prices and world prices is the presence of large trading
companies in international commodity markets."

While farmers earn less,
consumers pay more. In India, food prices have doubled
between 1999 and 2000. The consumption of food grains in
rural areas has dropped by 12%. Increased economic growth
through global commerce is based on pseudo surpluses. More
food is being traded while the poor are consuming less.
When growth increases poverty, when real production
becomes a negative economy, and speculators are defined
as” wealth creators", something has gone wrong with the
concepts and categories of wealth and wealth creation.
Pushing the real production by nature and people into a
negative economy implies that production of real goods and
services is declining, creating deeper poverty for the
millions who are not part of the dot.com route to instant
wealth creation.

Women - as I have said -
are the primary food producers and food processors in the
world. However, their work in production and processing is
now becoming invisible.

Recently, the McKinsey
corporation said: "American food giants recognize that
Indian agro-business has lots of room to grow, especially
in food processing. India processes a minuscule 1 per cent
of the food it grows compared with 70 per cent for the
U.S...".

It is not that we Indians
eat our food raw. Global consultants fail to see the 99
per cent food processing done by women at household level,
or by the small cottage industry because it is not
controlled by global agribusiness. 99% of India's agro
processing has been intentionally kept at the small level.
Now, under the pressure of globalization, things are
changing. Pseudo hygiene laws are being uses to shut down
local economies and small scale processing.

In August 1998, small scale
local processing of edible oil was banned in India through
a "packaging order" which made sale of open oil illegal
and required all oil to be packaged in plastic or
aluminum. This shutdown tiny "ghanis" or cold pressed
mills. It destroyed the market for our diverse oilseeds -
mustard, linseed, sesame, groundnut, and coconut.

And the take-over of the
edible oil industry has affected 10 million livelihoods.
The take over of flour or "atta" by packaged branded flour
will cost 100 million livelihoods. And these millions are
being pushed into new poverty.

The forced use of packaging
will increase the environmental burden of millions of tons
of waste. The globalization of the food system is
destroying the diversity of local food cultures and local
food economies. A global monoculture is being forced on
people by defining everything that is fresh, local and
handmade as a health hazard. Human hands are being defined
as the worst contaminants, and work for human hands is
being outlawed, to be replaced by machines and chemicals
bought from global corporations. These are not recipes for
feeding the world, but stealing livelihoods from the poor
to create markets for the powerful.

People are being perceived
as parasites, to be exterminated for the” health" of the
global economy.

In the process new health
and ecological hazards are being forced on Third World
people through dumping of genetically engineered foods
another hazardous products.

Recently, because of a
W.T.O. ruling, India has been forced to remove
restrictions on all imports.

Among the unrestricted
imports are carcasses and animal waste parts that create a
threat to our culture and introduce public health hazards
such as the Mad Cow Disease. The US Center for Disease
Prevention in Atlanta has calculated thatnearly 81
million cases of food borne illnesses occur in the US
every year. Deaths from food poisoning have gone up more
up more than four times due to deregulation. Most of these
infections are caused by factory-farmed meat. The US
slaughters 93 million pigs, thirty seven million cattle,
two million calves, six million horses, goats and sheep
and eight billion chickens and turkeys each year.

Now the giant meat industry
of US wants to dump contaminated meat produced through
violent and cruel methods on Indian consumers. The waste
of the rich is being dumped on the poor. The wealth of the
poor is being violently appropriated through new and
clever means like patents on biodiversity and indigenous
knowledge.

As humans travel further
down the road to non-sustainability, they become
intolerant of other species and blind to their vital role
in our survival.

In 1992, when Indian
farmers destroyed Cargill's seed plant in Bellary ,
Karnataka, to protest against seed failure, the Cargill
Chief Executive stated, "We bring Indian farmers smart
technologies which prevent bees from usurping the pollen".
When I was participating in the United Nations Biosafety
Negotiations, Monsanto circulated literature to defend its
herbicide resistant Roundup ready crops on grounds that
they prevent” weeds from stealing the sunshine". But what
Monsanto calls weeds are the green
fields that provide Vitamin A rice and prevent blindness
in children and anemia in women.

A worldview that defines
pollination as "theft by bees" and claims biodiversity
"steals" sunshine is a worldview which itself aims at
stealing nature's harvest by replacing open, pollinated
varieties with hybrids and sterile seeds, and destroying
biodiverse flora with herbicides such as Roundup. The
threat posed to the Monarch butterfly by genetically
engineered BT crops is just one example of the ecological
poverty created by the new biotechnologies. As butterflies
and bees disappear, production is undermined. As
biodiversity disappears, with it will disappear sources of
nutrition and food.

The world can be fed only
by feeding all beings that make the world. In giving food
to other beings and species we maintain conditions for our
own food security. In feeding earthworms we feed
ourselves. In feeding cows, we feed the soil, and in
providing food for the soil, we provide food for humans.
This worldview of abundance is based on sharing and on a
deep awareness of humans as members of the earth family.
This awareness that in impoverishing other beings, we
impoverish ourselves and in nourishing other beings, we
nourish ourselves is the real basis of sustainability.

The sustainability
challenge for the new millennium is whether global
economic man can move out of the worldview based on fear
and scarcity, monocultures and monopolies, appropriation
and dispossession and shift to a view based on abundance
and sharing, diversity and decentralization, and respect
and dignity for all beings.

Sustainability demands that
we move out of the economic trap that is leaving no space
for other species and other people. Economic Globalization
has become a war against nature and the poor. But the
rules of globalization are not god - given. They can be
changed. They must be changed. We must bring this war to
an end.

As Gandhi had reminded us:
"The earth has enough for everyone's needs ,but not for
some people's greed".

QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR

**Sujata Gupta, the Tata
Energy Research Institute: I'd like to hear your views on
sustainable use of scarce inputs like water for
agriculture. What I gathered from your lecture was total
condemnation of the market system. Vandana Shiva: Let me
first respond by saying - I love markets. I love my local
market where local "subgees" are sold, and one can chat
with the women. The tragedy really is that the market is
being turned into the only organizing principle for life,
and Wall St is being turned into the only source of value,
and it's the disappearance of other markets, other values
that I am condemning. In terms of water, the solution
to water conservation and scarce water management is not
putting it in the hands of those who can afford to buy the
last drop, but to put it in the hands of the community, to
use it sustainably within the limits of renewal. The water
must be returned to the communities and managed as a
commons - it has to be taken beyond the marketplace.

**Professor Marva,
University of Delhi: Can there be sustainable development
without sustainable population? Vandana Shiva: I think
that non-sustainable population growth is a symptom and
product of non-sustainable development. It's not that
population grows by itself as a separate phenomena - you
look at the data - Indian population had stability till
1800 - colonization, dispossession of land started to make
our population grow. Highest growth rates of population in
England is after the
enclosures of the commons. It's the loss of resources of
the people that generate livelihood and the replacement of
resources belabor to be sold on markets in an uncertain
daily wage market that triggers population growth.
Population growth is a result of non-sustainable
development.

Gulgit Choudhury, Ram
Organics: I have worked earlier with Monsanto. I have a
simple question to ask you. Suppose you were given the
opportunity to develop parameters of a social governance,
which ensures sustainability - what would you suggest for
countries like India.?Vandana Shiva: We are in fact
involved for the last few years -generating the kind of
criteria through participatory democracy building- through
ensuring that people at every level have the information,
through ensuring that communities are organized, to manage
collectively the resources that can only be sustained
collectively. If I have the money and power to drill a
deep tube well I can make dry my neighbor’s shallow well
and she will usually be a very poor woman. And therefore
the only way a village can conserve its ground water is to
do what the"Paani Panchayath" did in Harash - ensure that
water is used within limits. Systems of governance have to
begin with where people feel the impact, and therefore we
do require the rebuilding of decentralized direct
democracy. I do not see growers as isolated individuals
because their neighbors feel the consequences of their
action. If I am growing b.t. corn on my field I kill the
monarch butterfly of my neighbor’s field. Communities,
collectives are cohesiveness of societies are important to
talk about not individual growers, and that is the bottom
rung of decision making to which both which corporations
as well as governments need to be accountable - that is
the experiment that started after Seattle and that
experiment in accountable localisation to ensure that
decisions are made at appropriate place and production is
carried out at the appropriate level is really the new enterprise of
democracy that societies are involved in around the world,
even while globalisation threatens our lives.

Finally, we had this from
last year's Reith lecturer Anthony Giddens -addressing you
Vandana he says - "I congratulate you on your challenging
presentation. I have to say though I don't agree with much
of it. Isn'tit a contradiction in terms to use the global
media to put a case against globalisation?"

Vandana Shiva: I don't
think BBC is a product of the economic globalisation
regime that the World Trade Organisation gave us or thenew
recent trade liberalisation has given us. I think it was
created in l922 and international integration,
international communication is not what economic
globalization is about. Corporate concentration, corporate
control is what recent economic globalization is about and
in fact the BBC is a counter-example to that because the
real example of globalize media and communication is Time
Warner, now bought up by AOL, Disney, and the News
Corporation.

**Prof. Vinod Chowdhury,
reader in economics at St. Stephen's College: It strikes
me as very extraordinary that Vandanaji should have sucha one sided
approach. And I'm saying that with due respect to the
sheer vivacity of her presentation. Vandanaji seems to
believe that there are two clearly antithetical paradigms.
One is a paradigm that essentially is based on
decentralization, democratization - all the good things in
life - - women are cared for, poor people are cared for -
this, that and the other. And other is terribly evil.
Everything's wrong with it. Now surely life cannot be like
that Vandanaji may I plead with you to please consider
third paradigm, where we take bits and pieces from here
and there and get an eclectic, practical approach, and I
support Boopinder Singh Hooda - the President of the
Haryama Congress who asked you - and you didn't answer that -
what is the alternative at a time when no country can opt
out of the WTO - it's not a piece of paper madam - it is a
commitment that countries have to make or they will be
pariah countries and we cannot afford to be a pariah
country - please react?Vandana Shiva: I did react to him.
And I said rewriting those rules -rewriting those rules
that are one sided. In fact it's the WTO rules that are
totally one sided because they really only protect the
interest of one sector of the global community which is
the global corporations, not in the local industry, not
even local retail business, not small farmers anywhere,
not in the north and not in the south. And those rules can
be rewritten. That is the point I'm trying to make. Do not
treat WTO rules in the Uruguay Round Treaty as the final
word on how trade should be carried out. Those rules are
being reviewed. What we have called for in Seattle is a
more democratic input in what sustainable and just rules
would look like for agriculture on intellectual property
rights, in the area of services, in the area of
investments, the four new areas which were brought in. Before
that - no one had problems with the GATT. The old GATT was
about real trade in real products beyond national
boundaries. The new GATT with the Uruguay round -
and newer TPIP cross-Pacific to Asia agreements are
both about invading in every space of our everyday lives
... and if you are a woman you do have a somewhat
different point of view. That's why we talk of gender. If
you’re poor, you will have a different point of view from
the rich. To have different points of view because of
differences in location in society is not a problem. It is
opportunistic though to take a little element of the
perspective of the rich , a little element of the
perspective of the poor and put it into a little jigsaw of
opportunistic statements. Societies live by coherent
principles, organizational systems, values and worldviews.
And what we are calling for is to balance out that
one-sided idea that we live by commerce alone.

**Rovinder Raki, student:
You seem to eulogize the fairness and efficiency of
traditional agricultures, societies and production
patterns. But the reality is that the farmers were
exploited in these societies by moneylenders and feudal
lords. With the market reaching these societies that
exploitative social system certainly declines. Now what I
have to ask you is what restrains you from appreciating
this sanitizing effect of the market? Vandana Shiva: Well
the sanitizing effect of the market does end up treating
people like germs. Wipe them out. And it is that view of
dispensability, the disappearances of the small that I was
trying to draw attention to in my lecture. There has
always been exploitation, and I agree with Mr. Hooda, but
no exploitation before this period of current, economic
globalization, ever organized itself in ways that it could
totally dispense with the exploited. Even the slave system
needed the slave. Even the worst of British rule which
created the Bengal famine, (note: due to the Brits
exporting all the rice, a food staple, in 1943, the price
of rice quadrupled. No peasant in India could buy it and 3
million people died. This was the worst of a dozen famines
in India, brought on By Brits exporting the food staples.
The same occurred in Ireland under Brit rule. For details,
of the BENGAL FAMINE, NOT THE IRISH ONE, view article at http://www.ibtimes.com/bengal-famine-1943-man-made-holocaust-1100525

This famous famine led to
the "Faybehaga" movement, which rose against the
exploitation. Much needed to keep the peasants alive. For
the first time we have a system where no-one needs the
peasants, unless we realize that as societies we need
them, that we've reached a period where people are
actually talking in India, in other countries that you can
get rid of small producers. It's assumed that everything,
real growth, real prosperity is going to come out of cyber
space, but as you can see, you can have the
best of IT technologies floating above the carcasses of
people dying in Rajisthan and Gujerat right now -- and it
will not help them out. We have to pay attention to the
ecological base of our survival and the needs of all. I
personally am committed to feeling and believing that the
smallest of species and the smallest of people have as
much a right to live on this planet with dignity as the
most powerful corporation and the most powerful
individual.